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At Buzzfeed, Arianna Rebolini offers us some young adult books for our bucket list.

Number one in the Buzzfeed list is, of course, Harry Potter — and the Potter phenomenon is incredible. Certainly it is the most remarkable of our time, perhaps of all time. But a number one ranking inevitably implies a lot more, that it is a book, a series of books, a series of films, that puts it up there with Shakespeare and other greats of literature.

Personally, I’m not inclined to go that far. J. K. Rowlings has a massively vivid imagination and is a fab storyteller, but she is not one of the great writers. And yet these books land on every list, in #1 position virtually every time.

The list contains a number of books that have stood the test of time and that I would personally put on any such list. Others I’ve never heard of. A few of those, however, sound intriguing and I may have some reading to do.

What do you think of the following list?

37 Books Every YA Fan Needs To Read Before They Die

Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott

What it’s about: The classic novel, based on the author’s life, follows four sisters whose family fortune is lost in the midst of the Civil War.

Top quote: “I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”

At Metro.co.uk, Ann Lee Potter reports that a fan site, MuggleNet, has started a new movement using the hashtag #PotterItForward with readers sneaking notes into library and donated books explaining what JK Rowling’s novels meant to them in these secret notes.

Now that is something any author would love to see happen to their books.

~~~~~You’re never too old to read young adult fictionYA novels are brimming with brilliance, enthusiasm and pile-driving plots – it’s no wonder so many of them are enjoyed by older readers.

The biblio number-crunchers at Nielsen have just released the news that 80% of YA (young adult) fiction is bought by the simply A, Lucy Mangan tells us in The Guardian.

“Of course, it’s likely that some of this is being bought by adults for the young people in their lives (possibly after reading it themselves – who buys anyone a book they don’t read first?), but that still leaves a huge number being consumed by those outside the intended demographic.”

“Wow. That’s what I thought after reading the first story in Watkins’s debut collection, and I continued to have that visceral and not particularly insightful reaction after nearly every story in the book, which mines the history and present of the American west, particularly her home state, Nevada.

“One of the things I love about a book like this is that it shows me the incredible-ness of a place I’d never really given much thought. As someone from a state largely considereda fly-over afterthought, I appreciate when a writer like Watkins is able to entice us to look closely at a place and see how truly remarkable it is.”

~~~~~English magic: how folklore haunts the British landscapeSome fictional characters – Dracula, say, or Peter Pan – are so vivid that they detach themselves from their origin and become part of our common heritage. “But a folk tale is something different, Frank Cottrell Boyce writes in the New Statesman. It demands that we believe it has some truth in it. We go to see the claw marks of the Black Dog on the church at Blythburgh. We listen for the church bells of the drowned village. We want there to be a monster in the loch. We yearn to know that there really was a king called Arthur, even if he wasn’t all gussied up in armour and sitting at a round table.”

~~~~~Quote of the Day~~~~~Alma AlexanderMy books Email meIf you found this blog post interesting, amusing or helpful, then please use the icons below to share it with other writers, readers or the guy next to you on the subway.